Blogs

The Musings blog is the space where our team of design and business thinkers comes together to share what inspires us. We'll discuss all things design thinking, from customer ethnography to rapid prototyping to innovation strategy and beyond.

I've always been a fan of the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) mentality. The upside is easy to define, right? Saved time, effort, etc. and measured in opportunity cost. But, when is short too short? How and where do you cross the line to curt? I'm hoping to crowdsource some parameters.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately - with emails, meetings, phone calls, voicemails, proposals, LinkedIn profiles, and more - short is often an ideal standard, but when does it go too far, or, rather, not far enough? In email, for example, there seems to be a constant tension between "I want to be sensitive to your feelings (acknowledging who you are and what you've done) but I also want to be respectful of your time." Then, in proposals, it's "I want to tell you all the awesome things we've done before and how we did them, but really you should just do this." How do you pick a side?